Real Estate Market Trends in 2018

2017 was a transformative year for the American real estate market. Housing inventory tightened, and home prices and demand soared in response — particularly within major cities. Experts predict continued growth this year, although perhaps not quite as rapidly as last year. Search insights can help identify the top real estate market trends of 2018.

SPOT REAL ESTATE MARKET TRENDS WITH SEARCH

In order to get a broader view of current housing demands, we broke down the top searches driving traffic to the real estate industry in the beginning of 2018.

• “Apartments for rent” are in high demand, but this is a steadfastly popular term with little change since last year. It has a lower organic rate, suggesting many listing sites are already competing for this term in paid search.

• Mortgage calculator is an important term driving traffic to the real estate industry, and has an extremely high organic click rate.

• Many home search variations have high organic rates, and several of them include the phrase “near me” (which is a trending keyword phrase).

UP-AND-COMING REAL ESTATE MARKET TRENDS

Next, we charted fast-rising search terms — in other words, popular keyword variations that showed sizable growth in the beginning of 2018 when compared to the same period last year. These reveal several interesting trends for this year compared to last year.

THREE BEDROOMS OR BUST!

Three-bedroom rental searches have increased considerably year over year, revealing that larger rental properties will be in high demand in 2018.

• Real estate searches including the phrase “near me” are much more popular this year than they were a year ago — in many cases these terms draw about 2X as many search clicks as they did in 2017.

• 3/5 searches include the phrase “for sale”, which indicates a growing consumer desire to buy (rather than rent) property.

• Mobile home searches are rising, and according the US Census Bureau, sales of manufactured homes have been growing for years. We may see a spike in consumers buying their own land, then adding mobile or manufactured homes onto their property afterwards.